The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst [214]
Nick went into the deserted office on the ground floor, and started going through his desk. He didn't have to move out of Abingdon Road, in fact he was staying upstairs while he searched for a flat, but he felt the urge to organize and discard. It seemed clear, although Wani wouldn't say so, that the Ogee operation was closing down. Nick was glad he wasn't going to Nat's wedding, and yet his absence, to anyone who noticed, might seem like an admission of guilt, or unworthiness. He saw a clear sequence, like a loop of film, of his friends not noticing his absence, jumping up from gilt chairs to join in the swirl of a ball. On analysis he thought it was probably a scene from a Merchant Ivory film.
The doorbell trilled and Nick saw a van in the street where the Rolls had been. He went out and there was a skinny boy in a baseball cap pacing about, and some very loud music. "Ogee?" he said. "Delivery." He'd left the driver's door open and the radio on—"I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor" from Full Metal Jacket echoed off the houses while he piled up big square bundles on his trolley and wheeled them into the building. He'd taken over this bit of the street for five minutes—it was an event. It was the magazine. "Thanks very much," said Nick. He stood aside with the ineffectual half smile of the nonworker, longing to be left alone with the product. The boy pounded in and out, breathing sharply: it was as if this delivery was keeping him intolerably from another delivery, as if he'd have liked to have made all his deliveries at once. He stacked up the bundles, a dozen of them, in four squat columns. Each packet was bound both ways with tight blue plastic tape; Nick scratched at it and broke a nail. "Sign, please," said the boy, whisking a manifest and a biro from his jeans pocket. Nick hurried down a loose approximation of his signature, and handed the paper back, to find the boy looking at him with his head tilted and eyes narrowed. Nick coloured but hardened his features at the same time. If the boy was a Mirror reader he might well recognize him—he sensed a latent aggression muddle and swim towards a focus. "Want to see?" said the boy, and before Nick understood he'd whisked out a Stanley knife from his other pocket, thumbed the blade forward, and ripped through the tape on the nearest bundle. He pulled off the loose paper wrapping, slid the first glimpsed shining copy out, turned it in his hands, and presented it to Nick: "Voila!" Nick held it, like the winner of a prize, happy and unable to hide, sharing it courteously with the boy, who stood at his elbow working it out. Nick felt very exposed, and hoped there wouldn't be questions. "Yeah, that's beautiful," said the boy. "That's an angel, is it?"
"That's right," said Nick. Simon had done a wonderful job—clear glossy black, with the white Borromini cherub on the right-hand side, its long wing stretching in a double curve on to the spine, where its tip touched the wing tip of another cherub in the same position on the back, the two wings forming together an exquisitely graceful ogee. No lettering, except at the foot of the spine, OGEE, ISSUE i in plain Roman caps.
Nick thought he'd rather not open it, he was teeming with curiosity and hot-faced reluctance; he needed to be alone. The boy shook his head admiringly. "Yeah, fucking beautiful," he said. "Pardon my French." He stuck his hand out, and Nick shook it. "See you, mate."
"Yes . . . thanks a lot, by the way!"
"No worries."
Nick smiled, and watched his first critic bound out of